The Brute in Personal and National Partition Narratives

Abstract

It is a much acknowledged fact that the Partition of India brought out the brute force in mankind and unleashed a reign of butchery, rape and plunder. What, one wonders, were the reasons that fed the intense hate wave and turned one community against another in a vicious game of rebuttals trading train for train, life for life and rape for rape?

It was as if a history of centuries of bloodshed, the invader's brutal aggression and the native's anguish, that had lain congealed in the collective unconscious of a continent had awakened and transformed into a raging conflagration that consumed all in its sway.

So who was this brute? Where was he and what was he? Did the brute live within a particular community? Or was it rather the case of an absence of all socio-political curbs that ensure law and order in a society and the opening up of windows of opportunity for social miscreants and opportunists who then installed themselves at the helm of small gangs and spearheaded carnage in different localities?

How does the brute - the magnified brute – manifest in the partition narrative? And how has the trauma percolated down the line of memory? This paper explores the location of the ‘brute' in personal partition narratives and in partition literature through some short stories of Sa'adat Hasan Manto and the memoirs of my mother who was an eight year old at the time of partition in a haveli in Akalgadh, a village in the Gujranwala district.